The decoy effect affects the way you buy products and purchase periodical subscriptions. It's a powerful and true, and you should start using it as soon as possible.

“The components of the behavior … are not emotions, cognitions, and actions, each in isolation, but aspects of a larger whole that achieves its integration only within a cultural system…

The #1 thing you need to know to change behavior: You are weird

Ouch. Last week taught me a painful lesson in humility. I learned I was just using half the power of a persuasion principle I was convinced I’d mastered perfectly: social proof. Social proof works...

In this guest column, Antony Giorgione reveals 10 ways that behavioural sciences and marketing can be used to guide us to make choices both expected and un

One of the most striking announcements in this week’s UK budget was the introduction of a new ‘soft drinks levy’ (quickly dubbed the sugar tax), which will come into force in 2018. New taxes aren’t...

We value what we have more after we have it. In psychological terms, this is known as the endowment effect. We’re also extremely loss-averse. Framing a question within a fear of loss perspective...

Soothe-sayers and storytellers. Metaphor may play an enormous role in either the efficacy or failure of narrative in healing. To draw upon a common anthropological aphorism, metaphors are good to...

Last week, after finishing a presentation at the National HIV Prevention Conference, I took a cross-country flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles (via Houston). After boarding the plane, I found my seat...

1. We are in the middle of the 2015 holiday season. Are there findings in your research that help people stick to a New Year's Resolution? Yes, there’s a lot of recent psychology research, from our...

Be careful not to negatively prime your communications to members (forgive the irony). Negative priming occurs when we expose the audience to a negative stimuli prior to or during a communication. It...

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Marketers and advertisers who understand the importance of customer behavior and psychology consider heuristics (mental shortcuts that people use to form judgments and make decisions) to target their...

Status quo bias is a preference for the current state of affairs. We often avoid change; and if faced with a choice tend to go-with-the-flow of pre-set options or defaults.

Social marketers should always be on the lookout for new ideas about changing behaviors. This is the reason I spend time talking about different theories and models of behavior change. In workshops...

UK — The combination of scepticism, marketing savvy and online filtering has fed the continuing rise of super-selectivism, says Ben Shimshon of Britain Thinks. Super-selectivism is a form of...

Our natural inclination to compartmentalise our finances can lead to some surprising and sometimes contradictory behaviour, writes Crawford Hollingworth.

Our blog articles feature the latest ideas and thinking from our Action and Research Centre and Fellowship staff and guest bloggers. You are welcome to contribute and comment.

Measuring emotion in market research requires an understanding of the nuances of System 1 processing says Jeremy Pincus.

Here are the results of a relatively simple experiment. A client was launching a new community. They disagreed with us on what would motivate people. So we ran an experiment with 147 prospective...

Learn how to make your value proposition appeal to the reptilian brain and engage your audience, complete with examples.

Want to be a better fundraiser? Read 6 behavioral lessons for nonprofit fundraisers. Learn the key psychological principles that affect fundraising strategy

We have a common tendency to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviours of the majority to feel safer, to avoid conflict or simply to be more cognitively efficient in our decision-making.

The Lucky Iron Fish is a fish-shaped ingot that helps curb iron deficiency amongst families in Cambodia.

Providing a voice to those working in social marketing and behavior change.

Changing human behavior is a complex process, and social marketers working to influence people’s actions on health or social issues must possess a wide array of skills. What's the winning combination...

How can the same evidence lead to different conclusions? It’s all down to confirmation bias, says Crawford Hollingworth.